Professor Evonne Miller

Biography

Professor of Design Psychology Evonne Miller is Director of the QUT Design Lab, where our mission and vision is to reimagine and redesign the future. We create impactful change, applying our creative mindsets to three core domains: (1) industry and advanced manufacturing; (2) health; and (3) the built environment.

Evonne’s own research centres on design for health, where she is a leading voice on the value of arts and design-led innovation in healthcare transformation. She is co-Director of HEAL - the Healthcare Excellence AcceLerator, a bridge between the QUT design and innovation community and Queensland Health, which is accelerating healthcare improvement efforts across the state by integrating the positive creative energy and mindsets of  ‘design thinking, design doing and design visioning ’ into healthcare.

Evonne has over $4M in competitive research grants, 100+ academic publications in ageing, health, arts and design innovation, and is a Fellow of the Australian Association of Gerontology. She brings a collaborative, pragmatic, and interdisciplinary approach to problem solving, and is an experienced and dynamic presenter, project manager, and workshop facilitator, able to engage, influence and inspire. Evonne has led projects and workshops on pathways to virtual, connected and integrated care, planning for the pandemic, reducing procedural pain, informal caregiving, redesigning aged care and palliative care, as well as participatory research methods of Photovoice and Poetic Inquiry - with her work driving change across all levels of organisations.

Evonne has authored and edited several books, including:
- “Creating Great Places: Evidence-based urban design for health and wellbeing (Routledge, 2020; with A/Prof Deb Cushing) which outlines how designers can create great places that are inclusive, sustainable, and salutogenic (health-promoting);
- “Creative Arts-Based Research in Aged Care: Photovoice, Photography and Poetry in Action” (Routledge, 2021), exploring entering, living, and dying in aged care;
- “How to be a Design Academic: From learning to leading” (CRC Press, 2021, Edited with Prof Thea Blackler).

Evonne is currently working on her fourth book, with A/Prof Deb Cushing,  “Redesigning the Unremarkable” on the value of purposefully and creatively redesigning the unremarkable features and elements of our urban environment (from stairwells to streets, to shopping centres and hospitals) with the global priorities of sustainable, salutogenic (health promoting), playful, and inclusive design in mind.